After releasing Sunshine Hit Me, back in 2002, The Bees returned with the made-in-Abbey-Road Free The Bees two years later. It’s taken a further three years for Octopus to surface. Their third long-player was originally scheduled to come out last April.

Octopus’ release date was put back to September, then to this January, and so forth. Such tardiness prompted one wag to rechristen them The Snails. And their label, revealing the album was recorded in the sextet’s new basement studio on the Isle of Wight, spoke of Octopus’ “relaxed homebirth.”

Apparently, when touring, The Bees struggle to find a support band as they flit effortlessly from genre to genre from song to song, everything from Beatlesesque blues, think ‘Why Can’t We Do It In The Road?’, on first single ‘Who Cares What The Question Is” to eerie, dub-inspired shenanigans on ‘Left Foot Stepdown’. Now, personally I would’ve thought this makes their task easier as there are few styles they don’t reference. What’s beyond dispute, however, is that unlike contemporaries too numerous to mention in full, but we mean you, Mr Pritchard and Ms Melua, The Bees didn’t go to stage school.

Forget your Kooks and their Brit-School training, The Bees received the best education available to musical youth: pilfering their parents’ record collections. There’s more embezzlement going on throughout Octopus. Not least on ‘(This is For The) Better Days’ which nicks the chorus from Free’s ‘It’s All Right Now’, simultaneously slowing it right down in the process.

Granted, it’s taken The Bees three years to deliver their third album. But, hey people, let’s put things into context a little: Axl Rose has been promising Guns N’ Roses fans Chinese Democracy, the follow-up to Use Your Illusions I and II, for 16 long years (and counting). So quit with the complaining already, The Bees are back: prepare to be stung.

(4/5)